By LUCY ORMONDE
Moet.
Now there’s a word I can’t say out loud.
Ditto Yves Saint Laurent, remuneration, pho, Hayden Panettiere and chipotle. (And yes, I know Hayden Panettiere is not technically a word, but damn it’s hard to get it to roll off the tongue.)
These are the words I look at on the page, ponder momentarily and then promptly skip over. I know what they mean, but ask me to say them aloud in public? Well, please don’t.
I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had over the years about whether Babar is BA-bar or BAR-bar, Havianas is Hav-I-anas or Hav-anas and whether Uno is pronounced YOU-no, Oo-no ‘that card game.’
Best just not say those words. Ever.
For the girls in the Mamamia office the list of ‘words I can read but not say’ is long. There’s detritus, vale, coiffure, specificity and verbatim.
And let’s not forget Bon Iver, deus, excerpt (do we pronounce the ‘p?’), Givenchy, Hermes, paella, jalapeno, fajitas, memes, gifs (apparently it’s pronounced ‘jif’), zeitgeist and Zooey Deschanel.
Then there’s Nat Jastrzab, Mamamia’s production manager. We’re pretty sure not even she can say her last name.
Zoe Foster knows it’s like to fumble your way through a tricky word (or at least, watch other people do that). Recently, the former Mamamia beauty editor wrote a post about the beauty brand names no one can ever say. And they are?
Zoe FosterL’Occitane: Lox-ee-tarn
La Prairie: La preh-ree
Stila: Stee-lah
Jurlique: Jur-leek
Guerlain: Gher-lahn
St Tropez: San Trow-pay
Bourjois: Borj-wah
Lancome: Lahn-comb
Little too late for the St Tropez tip for me.
I once asked a Witchery sales assistant if she had any of the “Saint Trop-ez” sandals in a 39. Cue awkward when she called another store to ask if they had any in the “San Trow-pay” variety.
But at least I tried, right?
What words can you not say?
Top Comments
Don't know if someone said this much earlier, but - envelope. Is it EN-vel-ope, or ON-vel-ope. I almost always pause, and then say one or the other. If I say EN, I feel like I may have come across as wrong/uneducated (my school English teacher encouraged 'on-vel-ope'). If I say ON, I feel like I've just been ludicrously posh and stuck up. I don't actually think either of them sounds wrong from someone else, but the moment I go to say it myself (and it's amazing how often the word has to come up multiple times in quick succession in conversation from multiple speakers, once the topic arises), they both feel wrong!
A similar situation for 'data'. Working in schools in the UK, just about everyone with an East London / Cockney accent said DAY-ta, and I said DAH-ta, without even thinking about it. I would *never* say day-ta, it feels 'foreign' (personally unfamiliar) on my tongue, but I don't bat an eye when someone else says it. But if I say it, I feel like I'm talking about the Star Trek character. I wasn't even aware at this until the deputy head at my school called me on it, asking if I thought 'DAY-ta' was wrong. (Until then, I could not even have told you that everyone around me was saying it differently - it just didn't register as strange at all!) It gave me pause for thought, and I still don't know how'd I'd answer that. I don't 'hear' it as being wrong (even though I do with many other words that I consider less debatable / variable), but I would never say it, and would feel like I'd made a mistake on my own part if I did.
Ah - that's obviously a regional interpretation. It is pronounced traiT in most parts of the world. It may be "correct" from the French but has long since been Anglicised.
Oh, and although it's way too late now, "GIF" is pronounced with a hard G (gate, gift, gold) as it's an acronum for Graphics Interchange Format. So it has to be hard G as in "Graphics".